Fall 2013 Announcements: Poetry - Little Books, Big Stakes

By Craig Morgan Teicher
|

Jun 21, 2013

This fall promises a fine harvest of new poetry, including many new collections from poets we’ve been waiting to hear from for years. But, before we get to that, let’s get a couple of the doorstoppers out of the way. The big fall book will be Coffee House’s publication of Collected Poems by Ron Padgett, a veteran of the second wave of the New York School who’s been busily producing books since the ’60s. They’re almost all here. Padgett’s work is comic, but he deals, in a conversational manner, with the big issues, especially death and love. Random House will publish a new volume from one of poetry’s few bestsellers, Billy Collins, whose Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems gathers poems from the last decade. Collins is also much-beloved for his sense of humor, and his many fans are sure to want this book. The relaunched Liveright imprint will also bring out a new edition of E.E. Cummings’s Complete Poems, 1904–962, a book that should be in every poetry readers’ library.

But the real excitement for the fall comes in the slim packages of single poetry collections. Stay, Illusion (Knopf) is the first poetry collection in a decade from Lucie Brock-Broido, a poet of ornate style and high stakes. She takes her time with her poems, and they’re as finely laced as Victorian gowns. In these poems, Brock-Broido brings her inimitable mind to the subjects of age, love, and the longevity of the imagination. Jennifer Michael Hecht’s third book of poems, Who Said (Copper Canyon), presents acts of careful ventriloquism, channeling voices from across time and literature into a contemporary idiom.

Look out, too, for The Book of Goodbyes (BOA), a second collection from Jillian Weise. This is a book of fierce love poems, or poems of a love that just won’t go away. Weise is also an amputee (she calls her self a “cyborg”) and writes with equal fierceness from that perspective. Also check out Swoop (Graywolf) by Hailey Leithauser, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson Prize for a debut from an author in mid-life. This book has a surprisingly wide range and depth.

Entering mid-career is Geoffrey G. O’Brien, whose fourth book, People on Sunday (Wave), brings a new emotionality to his intricate, technical poetry. Under the Sign (Pengin), a new book by the legendary Ann Lauterbach, shows us a verbal magician at the height of her powers. Finally, Headwaters (Norton) by Ellen Bryant Voigt packs all the intensity one could want in a season—it’s a mournful collection with perfect verbal pitch.

For those of you who stuff stockings with poetry, you’ll have plenty to stuff ’em with. As the weather gets cold, head inside and read some poetry.

The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) by Homer, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (Oct. 1, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1451674170). A brilliant new version of the Odyssey from one of the most accomplished translators of our time.

BOA Editions Ltd.

(Dist. by Consortium)

Birth Marks by Jim Daniels (Sept. 10, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1938160165). A poet of the working class and city streets, Daniels, in is 14th poetry collection, travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial street to another, across jobs and generations, to an urban landscape with struggling inhabitants and streets hissing with distrust and violence.

The Book of Goodbyes by Jillian Weise (Sept. 10, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1938160141). In her Isabella Gardner Poetry Prize–winning second collection, Weise writes poems that throw into question sex, the law, identity, sentiment, and the power struggles within a deranged love affair.

No Need of Sympathy by Fleda Brown (Oct. 15, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1938160189). The former Delaware poet laureate’s wide-ranging eighth collection touches on contemporary science, physics, family, and politics. There are sonnets from a grandmother to all 10 grandchildren, poems about the Big Bang and child labor, all written with humility, humor, and a deep love of life.

There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick by Michael Teig (Nov. 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1938160202). Teig’s second collection is a perfect poetry companion: witty, intriguing, and self-effacing as it picks up overheard conversations and accidental encounters of everyday life.

City Lights Books

(Dist. by Consortium)

Here Come the Warm Jets by Alli Warren (Sept. 10, paper, $13.95, ISBN 978-0872866096). The second coming of gurlesque,this is the highly anticipated, swaggering debut of the Bay Area’s Warren.

Coffee House Press

(dist. by consortium)

Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems by Michael Davidson (Dec. 17, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1566893398). The best of Davidson’s 40-year career, these poems grapple with large philosophical questions through the sieve of language and form.

Psychedelic Norway by John Colburn (Oct. 15, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-1566893350). An exploration of folklore, visionary states, surrealism, hybrid forms, and the political implications of their confluence.

Dance by Lightsey Darst (Sept. 10, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1566893343). This is poetry as performance, precarious and joyful, a three-part journey through hell, earth, and paradise.

Collected Poems by Ron Padgett (Nov. 12, hardcover, $44, ISBN 978-1566893428). Fifty years of poems and wry insight celebrating one of the most dynamic careers in 20th-century American poetry. Announced first print: 5,000.

Copper Canyon Press

(Dist by Consortium)

Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison (Sept. 10, paper, $17, ISBN 978-1556593901). A new collection from one of America’s leading novelists and poets.

Dear Life by Dennis O’Driscoll (Sept. 10, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1556594076). Dear Life focuses largely on mortality in a consumerist world, and foreshadows the author’s sudden death in December 2012.

Bangalore by Kerry James Evans (Oct. 15, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1556594052). Evans’s gritty, hard-hitting debut combines war poems, elegies, and high Southern lyrics to create a new understanding of American identity.

Who Said by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Oct. 15, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1556594496). Hecht repurposes texts and creates a magic echo chamber, bringing the lines and lyrics of long-gone friends to the table.

King Me by Roger Reeves (Nov. 12, paper, $15, ISBN 978-1556594489). In this riveting debut, Reeves argues that black history is human history, and the suffering belongs to all of us.

Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower by Sarah Lindsay (Dec. 17, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1556594465). “Sarah Lindsay’s poems open doors to other worlds and other ways of seeing.”—New York Times

Swoop: Poems by Hailey Leithauser (Oct. 1, paper, $15, ISBN 978-1555976576). Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary by Harryette R. Mullen (Nov. 5, paper, $15, ISBN 978-1555976569). “Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs… No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic.”—Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

Grove Press

Singing at the Gates by Jimmy Santiago Baca (Jan. 7, hardcover, $23, ISBN 978-0802122100). This collection of Baca’s work spans over four decades.

O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound by Garrison Keillor (Oct. 1, hardcover, $20, ISBN 978-0802121615). Keillor’s first collection of his very own poems—a delightful book for all his devoted fans.

Knopf

F: Poems by Franz Wright (Aug. 27, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0307701589). From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, a haunting collection of poems, graced by his dark humor and wit as he assesses both the damage and the grace in our lives

Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter (Sept. 17, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0385349796). A collection of verse-both light and dark, elegiac and affirmative, from one of our most admired poets.

Stay, Illusion: Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido (Oct. 15, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0307962027). The much anticipated volume of poems from acclaimed poet Brock-Broido brings her work to a new level.

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems by Clive James (Oct. 28, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0871407115). New poems from this outspoken man of letters.

Mariner Books

Without a Claim by Grace Schulman (Sept. 10, paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-0544073777). Schulman, already known as “an elegiac, highly original religious lyricist” (Harold Bloom), elegantly weaves between generations and continents in her new collection.

Milkweed Editions

(Dist. by PGW)

Visiting Hours at the Color Line: Poems by Ed Pavlic (Aug. 13, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1571314604). Bearing the tones of soul, R&B, and jazz, this collection of prose poetry and free verse delves into the politicized and often racialized experiences of American characters.

Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap, trans. by Martha Collins (Nov. 12, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1571314598). A translation by Vietnamese poet Ngo Tu Lap by acclaimed American poet Collins. Black Stars introduces a man who is both attached to his war-haunted childhood home and deeply conversant with contemporary global life.

Chasing Utopia by Nikki Giovanni (Oct. 29, hardcover, $19.99, ISBN 978-0688156978). A new collection, Giovanni’s first in four years.

Oxford University Press

Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology by Tim Kendall (Dec. 1, hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-0199581443). A definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets offers a fresh assessment of the work on the centenary of the Great War’s outbreak.

Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins (Oct. 22, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0679644057). The first volume of New and Selected poetry in 12 years from the two-time Poet Laureate of the United States.

Charming Gardeners by David Biespiel (Oct. 1, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0295993287). These poems explore the “insistent murmurs” of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America’s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy.

W.W. Norton

Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, edited by Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland, and Allan Burns; intro. by Billy Collins (Aug. 26, hardcover, $23.95, ISBN 978-0393239478). An anthology of haiku in English, from Ezra Pound’s early experiments to the present-day masters.

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